Methane on Mars
There’s a methane mystery brewing on Mars.
Scientists first detected traces of methane gas on Mars years ago, and it was exciting because the compound is a sign of life here on Earth. But a European orbiter has yet to find any evidence of methane in the planet’s atmosphere, despite being expressly made for the purpose. It’s complicating scientists’ search for life on the Red Planet.
Traces of methane were first detected in Mars’ atmosphere by the Eur

A Far-Out Planet
An ambitious team of astronomers has discovered the most “far out” object ever observed in our Solar System. The object, a pink dwarf planet called 2018 VG18 and nicknamed “Farout,” lies more than 100 times further from the sun than the Earth is.
This discovery, made by Carnegie’s Scott S. Sheppard, the University of Hawaii’s David Tholen and Northern Arizona University’s Chad Trujillo, was formally announced today (Dec. 17) by the Inter

The universe is full of surprises, and a colossal young star has been hiding a stellar one.
While observing infant star MM 1a, astronomers found that its massive disk was actually forming another star instead of planets. The much smaller companion, dubbed MM 1b, was detected just outside the behemoth star’s dusty disk, and could actually house a planet-forming disk of its own. The discovery of the new star, published on December 14 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, marks one of the fir

Floating out in the solar system, the Cassini spacecraft captured a curious image of two moons that seem to be stuck together.The image actually shows Saturn’s moons Dione and Rhea, but because of the angle that the image was taken at, they appear to be conjoined. Cassini snapped the image before NASA crashed the ship into Saturn last year.
The spacecraft took this image 683,508 miles (1.1 million km) away from Dione (top) and 994,193 miles (1.6 million km) away from Rhea (bottom). So, wh

By looking at satellite images of scat stains left by Adélie penguins, researchers are investigating the well-being of the Antarctic ecosystem, which now includes a massive, previously unknown penguin colony.

By slamming small particles into heavy gold nuclei at nearly the speed of light, scientists have created tiny, ultra-hot droplets of a bizarre type of matter called a quark-gluon plasma (QGP), which once filled the entire universe shortly after the Big Bang.
Creating such a 'quark soup' is a tough task in its own right; the first sample of QGP was produced less than two decades ago by smashing two heavy atoms together. But for this new study, which was carried out as part of the PHENIX experimen